Nodejitsu Announces OpsMezzo

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April 23, 2013 - by Charlie Robbins

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This is a guest post by Charlie Robbins, founder and CEO of our partner, Nodejitsu. We're excited about their most recent release, and proud to say that not only are they a great partner, they're also hosted on Joyent!

After more than 18 months of work, Nodejitsu announced the release of OpsMezzo at TXJS this week, a complete solution to provisioning, orchestration and configuration management.

Cloud computing has matured dramatically since Amazon Web Services launched in 2006. A dizzying number of vendors have emerged in the market to solve a wide spectrum of specific problems.

These products have matured over the years, but they are built on a fundamentally flawed thesis: the parts are more important than the whole. In others words: organizations are on their own to integrate individual products into a complete system. Yes, there is a large amount of source material available through blogs, tutorials, and training, but the manual integration work remains.

At it's core, this means that organizations running in "the cloud" are dealing with too many vendors to solve simple problems. Vendors using multiple languages, databases, operating systems and other operational internals. While we live in a polyglot world, the operational calculus of running these multi-vendor systems is challenging to even seasoned professionals.

At this point you are probably wondering: "What about PaaS solutions?" PaaS is great for individuals and organizations who do not have (or do not want to have) an operational competency. This concept of "NoOps", while attractive to some, is also fundamentally flawed:

Too simple for larger organizations: In order to present users with a set of APIs that are simple enough even for novices massive operational details are hidden. Larger organizations (especially those running their own datacenters) already have an operational competency, so the PaaS abstraction is just too simple.

Still too many vendors: Heroku pioneered the concept of "add -ons" and since then every PaaS company has been quick on their heels to copy that model. This leaves their customers paying too much to too many vendors with little-to-no visibility behind the scenes.

We saw these problems two years ago in the early days of Nodejitsu and set out to make OpsMezzo a complete solution built entirely on a single platform: Node.js + CouchDB.

Keep reading to learn more about how OpsMezzo can streamline and simplify your devops workflow. Or if you're interested in trying out OpsMezzo in your organization send an email to sales@nodejitsu to get a free evaluation!

quill and the backend service it communicates with, composer, are Open-Source.

A system of actors

The name OpsMezzo comes from the musical team intermezzo:

Intermezzo: a short movement or interlude connecting the main parts of the composition.

All of the actors in the OpsMezzo system are designed to work together. In line with our commitment to Open Sourceevery actor is Open Source or built directly on-top of MIT licensed Open Source software.

quill: A configuration management tool that talks to composer and understands system.json.

By developing all of these tools together OpsMezzo eliminates the months of work necessary to integrate other off-the-shelf software.

Want more about OpsMezzo?

This is just the beginning for OpsMezzo. We couldn't be more excited to have released 12 repositories as Open Source in a single day.

Over the next few weeks we will be releasing all of the documentation, even for actors that are not Open Source). Right now all of the documentation for Open Source libraries (such as quill and composer) can be found at docs.opsmezzo.com.

Interested in trying out OpsMezzo in your organization? Send an email to sales@nodejitsu to get a free evaluation.